Bryony Rose – Why brands must adapt their AI strategies now

Bryony Rose, director for Yext’s Enterprise International business. (Source: Nedbank IMC)

The #NedbankIMC conference took place on Thursday, 18 September at Mosaiek Teatro, Johannesburg, where a lineup of international and local experts shared their knowledge with 3,000 delegates who attended virtually and in person.

Rose explained that Google has been the go-to search for two decades, however a new disruptor has arrived: large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.

People are increasingly turning to these tools to explore options by having conversations with AI for specific individual answers.

“We coined it the explore exploit phenomenon, which is where lots of people are more comfortable now, having a dialogue, a conversation about things that they want or they need, on one of these LLMs.

"Once they find what they want, they go back to Google and they purchase it. They transact, they go to the website, because as it stands, you can't do all of that in AI, yet.”

South Africa’s high adoption rate

Rose gave insight into how South Africa is adopting AI. "The first one is public adoption, which is among one of the highest globally. So people are using this in their day-to-day lives and getting confident with it.

Also, businesses, really high percentage of businesses here are saying they're either AI ready or preparing for AI readiness, or that they're actually already using, be it for generative AI, creating content, creating efficiencies in their business."

Artificial Intelligence

From Google to TikTok: The rise of generative engine optimisation

3 Sep 2025

Why data is everything

She emphasised the importance of ensuring that data is clear, consistent, structured and up to date across review sites, social media, and websites.

Rose's message was clear, "Your AI strategy is ultimately your data strategy, and then the frequency of something changing, is a really positive signal.

AI is a data scientist. You can’t pay to be there — yet. But you can prepare your data so AI finds you.”

She expressed how if you’re not showing up with the right local data, AI will pull answers from somewhere else — and often that’s forums like Reddit.

She discussed how brands and businesses need to adapt to the transforming search habits online of different demographics, "I think, from a Gen Z perspective, over 30% of Gen Z's will find your brand for the 1st time on TikTok.

"If that's not something you're considering, you're missing a proportion, a vast proportion of that demographic, and then your web pages."

Preparing for memory-driven AI

Rose closed by explaining AI’s growing ability to remember user conversations and have a stored memory. If a family tells an AI they are vegan, for example, the model will recommend restaurants that are suitable in future.

"I just wanted to touch on memory when we're thinking about AI preparedness, because AI encourages you to prompt it.

If you don't get prepared now, you're not part of these memory conversations. You're on branded searches, you want to appear, and be apart of this memory and this consistent dialogue."

Rose warned that in an AI-native world, successful online visibility will be earned through structured data that proves your brand is the best option and deserves to be surfaced.